The ability to collect, analyze, and manage massive amounts of information has become a necessity in business today. It is common for a large enterprise to employ multiple data management tools and/or multiple instances of a single tool in processing its transactional data. Such tools may include reporting tools (e.g., business intelligence (BI) tools offered by Business Objects Inc. of San Jose, Calif.), data integration tools (e.g., data extraction/transformation/loading tools offered by Informatica Corporation of Redwood City, Calif.), database management systems, modeling tools, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, etc. Each of these tools typically maintains a data management application to store data pertaining to various operations conducted by an enterprise and a metadata repository to store metadata describing the content and structure of the transactional data.
The use of multiple, different third party data products within an enterprise may result in unnecessary data redundancy and data quality problems unless an efficient management of metadata residing in various metadata repositories is provided.
Existing metadata management products typically collect metadata from metadata repositories within an enterprise by copying metadata maintained by each third party product into a central repository. However, this approach has several major flaws. First, copying data from external repositories is usually a time-consuming process involving the execution of batch-oriented programs. The design, implementation and configuration on the system is time consuming and must be maintained over time. Next, because metadata in source systems constantly changes, information in the central repository may often be out-dated even if a time-consuming data synchronization process is performed periodically. Further, current metadata management products typically fail to provide flexibility in customizing the metadata environment and are designed for use by technical staff such as a database administrator or a system administrator rather than non-technical personnel.
Therefore, what is needed is a metadata management tool that would overcome the disadvantages of the prior art.